413 in the house: An exploration of a black sense of place and black placemaking in Springfield, Ma

Abstract

Black matters are indeed spatial matters (McKittrick 2006 xii), and diverse spaces are not a stand in for racially inclusive spaces. Through a Black geographic and Black feminist exploration of my hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, my Masters thesis provides a discursive map detailing how Black social realities are bound up in the (re)production of the city’s landscape through the lens of Black embodied knowledge holders. In total, I executed 15 semi-structured interviews via Zoom, received 1 written response from Historian Joseph Carvalho III, and conducted an inter-textual analysis of documents relating to Springfield’s Black history, to understand the nuances of Black socio-spatial experiences from those most impacted by the nexus of race, class, and place. In centering individual and collective Black identity formation, I illuminate the complexities surrounding the way people of color materially and discursively negotiate a white gaze in the mid-sized, old industrial New England city of Springfield — a white gaze that is underpinned by dominative, anti-black discourses, and systemically racist structures — while also asserting life-affirming facets of their personhood. Ultimately, tracing the temporal lineages of Black struggles in Springfield provides a comprehensive case study that supports the usefulness of “a black sense of place” (McKittrick 2011), “quiet” (Quashie 2012), and “black placemaking” (Hunter et al. 2016) as guiding analytical lenses for other scholars with humanist visions who are looking to make space for facets of knowledge production that are silenced by traditional political economy discourses. As a case in point: my Masters thesis focuses on exploring the relationship between Black interiority and public expressions of resistance for more nuanced understandings of Black culture.